On the subject of physical danger, Nick Riewoldt knows whereof he speaks: this is the man who, in his much-decorated AFL career with St Kilda, was famous for hurtling back into packs to take marks with total disregard for his own safety. But as he tells it, after joining the fray in the new season of Celebrity MasterChef, “I’m not sure what’s more dangerous, the footy field or the kitchen.“

Peril apparently lurks behind every recipe at Kitchen HQ. “Cuts, burns, I definitely wasn’t immune to those,” Riewoldt reminisces. “I think I had some sort of contact with the nurse every day I was on the show, which was disappointing but probably true to form.”

Not that he’s complaining: indeed, for the former All-Australian captain, MasterChef was just what he needed, four years after retiring from the game. “Since retiring from footy, I’d been living a life where I hadn’t been challenged. It was really a desire to put myself back in a situation of feeling uncomfortable, then trying to be comfortable with that feeling again. That was the motivation.” If he was searching for something approximating the intensity of professional sport, he seems to have found it. “Everything was supercharged: my nerves and anxiety before a cook were supercharged, the fun in the fun moments was supercharged, the level of satisfaction in actually getting something on plate ... everything was magnified.”

Of course, motivations vary. Fashion titan Collette Dinnigan confesses that “if I’d seen it, I probably wouldn’t have done it!” Having lived in Italy for several years, only recently returning to Australia, MasterChef was a closed book to Dinnigan, but “I think they had a very good producer who was very convincing ... my initial thoughts were, oh my god, absolutely no way, no reality TV for me. And then I thought, life has been so extraordinary, what we’ve been faced with in the last year or so, why not try something different?”

Dinnigan and Riewoldt come from different worlds, to put it mildly. But their presence on Celebrity MasterChef proves that, unlike many “celebrity” reality shows that tend towards bottom-scraping in their casting, this is a franchise that aims higher. Also in the kitchen are luminaries including soccer great Archie Thompson, actress Rebecca Gibney, Olympian Ian Thorpe, comedian Dilruk Jayasinha and more. It’s not just recognisable faces being confronted with the mystery boxes: these are people who have proven themselves to be seriously good at what they do. Of course, “what they do” isn’t cooking, which is where the fun comes in.

For Dinnigan, one of the greatest challenges was the lack of control over how she came across on screen. “It’s the edit, because when something’s going wrong, you can’t change the direction. And the judges are talking to you, and you’ve got a sharp knife: you’re under the pump. You’re in the moment and you’re running with it and you’ve just got to calm yourself down: it’s only a cooking show, it’s not life and death.” Mind you, she adds, “I think the sporty people were a lot more competitive than the non-sporty people.”

Riewoldt backs up this observation: for him, the most difficult part was trying to suppress his competitive instincts. “I knew I was going to be typecast as one of those people who’s super-competitive on the field. I didn’t want to be the one who, when you walk through the door, is: ‘I’m here to win! Win at all costs! Take no prisoners!’ I wanted to avoid that narrative ... but under pressure, your true colours come out, and for sure that happened with me.”

But even with hyper-competitive souls like Riewoldt in the mix, the tale told by celebrity cooks is remarkably similar to that usually related by contestants on the regular version of the show: one of an almost too-supportive love-fest where the real croquembouche is the friends we made along the way. Riewoldt says he “made what will be lifelong friendships”, while Dinnigan rhapsodises about her fellow cooks: “Every single one of them were fabulous people, they all had good hearts and good souls and good humour. We were very close, and it was a great team, everybody helped each other. And it was natural, it wasn’t forced, it was very authentic.“